Cheney returns

There's an old political fable about the disconsolate mother of two sons.

One of them was lost at sea, the other became Vice President of the United States, and neither was ever seen or heard from again.

In this distinctly outmoded tale, the recently retired Dick Cheney would not qualify, in terms either of his past service or his current demeanor.

For all the early post-9/11 reports about his being shunted to "an undisclosed location" to somehow protect the country, in his eight years in office he was perhaps the most visible and vocal presidential standby in American history.

Since leaving the office, Cheney has been like those diehard Japanese soldiers in World War II who ran off and refused to surrender their rifles, firing from the jungles long after their emperor threw in the sponge.

He continues to pop up on the television talk shows in a relentless rear-guard action against his critics and the winners of the last election.

Cheney's chief rap is that his defense of torture techniques used on Iraq War prisoners, or "detainees" in the apparently less offensive term, remains justifiable.

Their abandonment by the Obama Administration, he insisted on "Face the Nation" last Sunday, "means in the future we're not going to have the same safeguards (against terrorist attack) we've had for the last eight years."

The observation amounts to a handy before-the-fact "I told you so" in the event of another such attack, with no way at all to establish that the failure to waterboard prisoners or use any other torture technique had been responsible.

As for Cheney's contention that use of those techniques saved lives, and that there are Bush administration memos to prove it, if they exist they should be made public, as he has proposed.

But what about his other argument, that disclosure of American harsh interrogation techniques would hand valuable information to the terrorists?

What is most surprising about Cheney, as a sitting vice president and now as a retiree from the office, is the transformation after years as a non-threatening, behind-the-scenes Washington functionary.

As a congressional aide, congressman, White House chief of staff under Gerald Ford and secretary of defense under the first George Bush, Dick Cheney was a genial, loyal, inoffensive staff man.

But the way he became the second George Bush's running mate while vetting other prospects for the job, and then used it to exert great executive power for himself, marked a remarkable personal metamorphosis.

Indeed, the man might well have positioned himself for the Republican presidential nomination after Bush's tenure had he chosen to run, despite his history of heart disease and the revulsion that developed toward him by critics.

His seemingly newfound taste to defend his record publicly may chagrin those Republicans who want to close the door on the recent past.

But to those conservatives who want to circle the wagons and purge the party's ranks of change agents, Cheney will remain a hero.

Perhaps because he long ago renounced interest in seeking the presidency, he feels liberated now to man the party's conservative barricades.

He even defended right-wing polemicist Rush Limbaugh, who declared on the air that he hoped Barack Obama would fail, and said that retired Gen. Colin Powell would be better off leaving the GOP and becoming a Democrat, after having voted for Obama "purely and solely based on race."

Even after that remark, Cheney told CBS News' Bob Schieffer, "If I had to choose in terms of being a Republican, I'd rather go with Rush Limbaugh. My take on it was Colin had already left the party. I didn't know he was still a Republican."

By contrast, George W. Bush in retirement so far has pretty much eschewed trying to defend the past and taking shots at other Republicans as he fades into history.

That may come in the inevitable (and usually unrevealing) presidential memoir.

In any event, one used to be able to simply ignore vice presidents as inconsequential.